already read this list has heard of Zope 3 (as in, they understand what

it's all about, and they understand the distinction between Zope 2 and

Zope 3) and very few have heard of Zope in general. They have, however,

seen all the Ruby-on-Rails demos and are talking about it all the time.

Advertising

Yeah, but honestly I don't care. If people choose a technology on name
recognition and not on technical merit, then it is their bad. However, I

question the RoR hype. I wonder whether big companies seriously
considering
it; it has absolutely no track record. Zope 2 (and even 3) on the other
hand

is deployed on many huge sites and the risk of deploying it is low. Even
deploying Zope 3 is a smaller risk than RoR.

And what if they've never heard about Zope 3 at all, what if it doesn't
even come up in their discussions? The people that make the decisions
don't necessarily have the time to research and try out every single
framework out there. In fact, they almost never do.

The presumption that people will just "find" your technology may hold when
there are only a few contenders, but there are dozens of web frameworks
even in the python space, dozens more in the Java space, and don't even
try to count the PHP ones. And there are many, many people who are
approaching the search thinking they'd be more comfortable with PHP or
Java (which they are more likely to have experience with than python) and
think that, "if they don't even promote this on their own web site, it
must be marginal thing that I shouldn't bother with."

This happens. Every single day. I think it's short sighted not to care.
How much better would Zope be if it had more real use cases, more serious
users and ultimately more contributors?

Why does Plone have so many users and such an active community? (hint:
It's not because it's technology is de facto better than say CPSs...)

Note that I'm not saying that the same people who produce the code (and
great code it is, which is why I care so much about this) should be doing
this. In fact, the Plone experience tells us they probably shouldn't. But
*someone* ought to, because it's a shame each time someone picks a less
appropriate framework just because they didn't know Zope 3 existed or that
it was complete (I didn't know it was complete until after Zope 3.1 was
released, and I was actively writing Plone code at the time).